According to Fortune, AirOps has raised a $40 million Series B funding round at a $225 million valuation led by Greylock. The New York and San Francisco-based startup, founded in early 2022 by CEO Alex Halliday, originally focused on helping non-technical employees access data before pivoting to AI-powered marketing tools. Their core product analyzes public information about companies across blogs, Reddit, and news articles to help marketers keep content fresh. Major customers include Monday.com, Webflow, and Ramp. Greylock partner Mike Duboe called the shift from traditional search to LLMs a “hair-on-fire problem for CMOs” that’s forcing the entire marketing industry to relearn organic growth strategies.
SEO is dead, long live AI
Here’s the thing: everything we thought we knew about winning Google traffic is basically obsolete. The old SEO playbook of keyword stuffing, backlink hunting, and content recycling? It’s getting demolished by AI chatbots that crave novelty. AirOps CEO Alex Halliday makes a fascinating point – while SEO rewarded repackaging existing content, AI agents actually starve for fresh data and original opinions. That means marketers can’t just churn out the same tired listicles anymore. They need to generate genuinely unique ideas. Sounds great in theory, but how many companies are actually equipped to do that consistently?
The content tightrope
We’re walking this weird tightrope right now. On one side, you’ve got AI-generated slop flooding the internet. On the other, you’ve got the potential death of media as we know it. But Halliday insists we’re entering a “golden age of quality content” where AI will reward the best information. The question is, will chatbots actually drive traffic to websites and products? For marketers, the business model is uncertain. For news outlets? It’s even murkier. I mean, theoretically publications have never had more domain authority, but will that translate to revenue when users get their answers directly from chatbots?
Human content matters again
There’s something almost poetic about this shift. After years of gaming algorithms and optimizing for machines, we’re circling back to what actually matters: good content created by humans. AirOps isn’t about pushing a button to generate endless mediocre articles – it’s about using data to help marketers “add to the conversation” with unique perspectives. And honestly, that’s refreshing. The author notes that in this new future, getting ideas placed in quality outlets like Fortune becomes even more important. So maybe there’s hope for us content creators after all. If you figure out the magic formula before I do, hit me up – I’m all ears.
